Thursday, November 21, 2013

It's that time of year. Directors, producers, multimegastars are doing the holiday press push for awards consideration on their films. One of the hallmarks of this process in the last few years has been the various roundtables that The Hollywood Reporter orchestrates, and with their "producers" roundtable having just dropped, The Playlist points out an interesting anecdote shared between Michael de Luca and Mark Wahlberg on their experience making Boogie Nights.

MDL: 'Boogie Nights' scored horribly. They recruit for these [test screenings] off a paragraph [synopsis] in the mall, and the paragraph for 'Boogie Nights' made it look like a sitcom, and then they come for this three-hour exegesis on existential crises in porn. It got to a point where Bob Shaye, my old boss, chased good scores on that movie, and that movie was never going to score high.

MW: I remember he did his own cut and made Paul watch it.

MDL: Yeah, it was horrible. It was tough. That movie was going straight to video, and then the reviews started to come in at the New York Film Festival. If it wasn't for early reviews…

It's hard not to consider the dazzling irony of the prospect of the film going straight to video, given its message about the effects of video production over celluloid distribution. You can watch the roundtable in its entirety below, or skip to the pertinent information starting around 44:50.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

We were able to grab a few wonderful minutes on the phone with Rhode Island filmmaker Laura Colella to discuss her new film Breakfast With Curtis, which Paul Thomas Anderson warmly embraced at the LA Film Festival last year. The movie follows an introverted 14-year-old boy who is enlisted to be a videographer by his eccentric bookseller neighbor, and in the process, grows a formative bond with the rest of his small community. In the interview, we covered everything from meeting Paul, to the inspiration she found in her home-town of Providence, to the precarious nature of the film festival circuit. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. Enjoy!

C&RV: As a relative newcomer to your work, I have to say that Breakfast With Curtis offers a very palpable sense of location and age. What drove you to capture Rhode Island in such a light?

LC: Well, it's actually -- that's where I live. I'm based in Providence, Rhode Island. This is my third feature, and I've shot most of all of them there. My first two features were mainly shot there. It's just a place that really kind of inspires me. It has a lot of great locations, a lot of talented, interesting people. So that combined with the fact that I'm working in a sort of low-budget realm has made it a perfect place to shoot. I teach at film schools, I teach at Rhode Island School of Design, in their film program, and I'm teaching screenwriting at Brown and I've always incorporated students into my work, too, as crew. Sort of a mix of professional and student crew.

C&RV: Talk a bit about casting non-professional actors in the lead roles of Breakfast With Curtis. Having cast friends and acquaintances, mainly, were you able to write the script with their voices in mind? Did any of them have any trepidation about joining the film?

LC: (laughs) Did you know about the background of the film before seeing it?

C&RV: No, actually, I didn't it. I went in fresh.

LC: Oh okay, cool. That's the fun part. That's how I like people to see it, you know? I don't know how much you know about the back story, but in reality, everybody who lives in the purple house in the movie lives in those actual apartments in real life, and everybody who lives in the pink house next door actually lives in the pink house next door. So I live in that house with my boyfriend, who plays the character of Frenchy, and then on the second floor, that elderly woman is our landlady. And then downstairs, Syd and Pirate are actually Adele [Parker] and Theo [Green]. Next door, the couple who are Curtis's parents are actually Curtis's parents and the little boy who plays Young Curtis is his little brother. So that's the full story, and all the cats and dogs really live there too (laughs).

C&RV: What would you say was the biggest challenge in getting your vision on the screen with limited resources? Were there any big compromises you had to make in order to see that vision through, given the constraints of budget and time?

LC: I was very fortunate throughout the process that things went pretty smoothly, and that it was a fairly relaxed shoot, and that I had help come in, in post-production when I needed it -- people who kind of came on board and helped with the finishing phase... really kind of pro sound mixers and colorists and things like that, kind of in the finishing process... But making it was very hands on, and I'd say the biggest challenge has been music licensing, 'cause I put in a lot of music, so…

C&RV: Yeah, I noticed that! All of a sudden Brian Eno came on the soundtrack...

LC: (laughs) Yeah, that's been replaced. Some things have been replaced, but I'm really happy with the replacement, so it worked out.

C&RV: Well since you brought up music, I was going to ask, did you conceive the film for specific musical qualities or did you discover it in the post-production process?

LC: The big discovery for me was John Fahey's music. He's the solo guitarist whose music is throughout the -- sixteen tracks of his used in the film. And I just became really attached to those. I kept using them, and I was like, "Oh my god," he almost started sounding like a narrator to the movie. So I became really attached to that music, and I was able to license that music, so that was a really big relief, because I had grown so attached to it.

C&RV: And he wasn't an
assigned composer, you discovered him later?

LC: I discovered him later on. He's deceased actually. It was
through his estate that I was able to license it.

C&RV: It's good that it was
able to actually wind up in the film because it adds a really nice touch to it.

LC: Yeah. I love it.

C&RV: One of the most
immediately striking things in the film is the use of color; the big purple
house, Frenchy's yellow gym shorts and exercise room, etc. Talk a bit about
your process for finding what you wanted this film to be cinematically. How did
you enjoy being your own DP?

LC: Yeah. I mean, I think our homes and our yards are very, sort
of, visually interesting and rich. That's always been part of the attraction
for me shooting there. That was always there from the beginning. I knew that we
had great looking sets and locations at our fingertips. That was definitely a
big draw. The combination of the characters around me and the locations around
me immediately just made it a real draw, to want to shoot this project. I also
wanted to shoot it myself because I really… I had a couple of people helping me
-- Jake Mahaffy, who's a really terrific filmmaker who was living a block away
from me at the time actually. And my boyfriend Aaron also operated sometimes,
usually for Steadicam-type shots. They shot whenever I was in it, basically. My
first two features I shot with a DP, but my training as a filmmaker was very
hands-on. I shot all of my student films, and I've shot stuff over the years
for myself and for other people, but it was really exciting to be able to shoot
this myself with a 5D. Really low-tech and hands-on.

C&RV: Having made a couple feature films through this system now, and maneuvering through the festival process with Breakfast With Curtis, how do you feel about the sate of independent film? Is it harder to get your movie seen than you anticipated?

LC: Gosh, you know, that part of it was definitely difficult. I
felt like it should've gotten into festivals that it didn't get into. And we
had a great premiere at the LA Film Festival, and that's actually where Paul [Thomas Anderson] saw the film, so that was really great. And that's just a really wonderful
festival, actually. They take great care of filmmakers. So it turned out to be
a wonderful premiere, but there turned out to be a lot of -- I submitted it
around to other festivals that it didn't get into that I thought it should've.
But that part is such a crap shoot. I'm sure it's the hardest part for most
people. I feel like I was fairly lucky with this film, and also in getting the
chance to have it distributed.

C&RV: Talk a little bit
about finding financing for an independent film. Was your experience at RISD
helpful in getting your films off the ground? How were you able to scrounge up
the resources to make Breakfast With Curtis happen?

LC: This is really a no-budget film, relatively. It was a really
tiny budget. I got a couple of grants, small grants, that covered basically all
of the production and post-production budget. One of those grants was from the
Rhode Island School of Design where I teach, and one of them was from the Rhode
Island State Council on the Arts, and they were both just really small grants,
but because I did all the work, I edited it myself -- no one was paid to work
on it -- and the only person shooting was me, Aaron, and a former student from
RISD who had just graduated who did the sound for most of it. And there's
occasionally a few other people. The crew ranged from me actually shooting by
myself to five at the most, probably. Pretty tiny production.

C&RV: Paul Thomas Anderson was a big champion for the movie coming out of the LA Film Festival in 2012. How did you two cross paths initially? Talk a bit about what his support means for the film moving forward.

LC: We met at the Sundance Lab. I was a screenwriting and directing
fellow in the year 2000. He was one of the creative advisers there. He was
there for the first week as one of the advisers, and he was just very
sympathetic to my project, which was not this project, it was another project
called Stay Until Tomorrow. That was
my second feature. But he was just really helpful in giving feedback when I had
a rough cut of the film. We just basically stayed in touch through email over
the years. And then he came to the screening at the festival, and he liked it
so much that he offered to host a screening of it at the Aero Theatre. And I
was like, "Oh, great!" It was a little dream idea. And then I just
kind of followed up, and he came through. It was amazing. We had a really long,
nice Q&A, full house. Very generous of him, sweet.

Breakfast With Curtis opens at the Cable Car Cinema in Providence, RI, this Friday, November 22, at the IFC Center in New York, NY, on Wednesday, December 4th, and at the Downtown Independent in Los Angeles, CA, on Friday, December 20th. Seek it out!

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

So far, the only two actors to come out and speak publicly about the experience of making Inherent Vice with Paul Thomas Anderson have been a stealthy Eric Roberts, and Josh Brolin, who (by our count) has just made his third set of public remarks on the matter. Our very attentive readers pointed us toward a sound bite from Mr. Brolin last week where he referred to the making of the movie as "the craziest, most brilliant experience of [his] life."

Now, as he begins press for Spike Lee's "Oldboy" remake, Brolin seems to already be waxing nostalgic on the process of working with PTA . Via The Playlist:

“My dad said recently, and I really appreciated it, 'There's a lot of directors out there but there's very few storytellers.' And working with these extreme geeks like myself who are very much these film fanatics is so nice. You're in this kind of iconic awe, and then you get to the set and you go, 'Okay, I actually have to work, we actually want to make this as good as I can be.' Like with Paul: he was taking stuff out of 'Inherent Vice', whittling away at what was in the book, and I was saying wouldn't it be great if we could bring some of what was in the book back," Brolin said. "Who the fuck am I to say that, you know what I mean?”

He added, “But then we start collaborating and putting stuff in there, and realizing, 'Okay…let's take it out, let's colorize it even more with something else, and then how are we going do this on set?' You realize all the work you've done around a table was meaningless, but it fed something. You don't know what it was, but you're always looking for that elusive thing.”

With "Oldboy"and Jason Reitman's "Labor Day"both set for release this year, it seems fair to assume Brolin will be doing quite a few more of these interviews in the coming weeks, so rest assured we'll have our eyes and ears out for more anecdotes. Perhaps the real question is, which cast member will come out of the woodwork next?

A fictional screenplay with fictional characters made so well it felt like a biographical nonfiction drama, like a considerately staged documentary. Identity of place and people. I could smell and taste it.

Finally, last week we spoke with Laura Colella, the writer/director/star of PTA-favorite "Breakfast With Curtis." We covered everything from the nature and difficulties of making a micro-budget independent feature to how she and Paul got connected in the first place. We're aiming for that interview to go live by the end of the week, so be sure to check back for that in the next few days.